Generally, distributed service applications are hosted in cloud-computing networks (across various nodes) and are intended primarily to promote high availability through redundancy of service-application components, dynamic scalability, and auto-healing functionality. These service applications are often divided into portions that include a group of service-application components. These service-application components may be hosted throughout nodes (e.g., physical machines and virtual machines) of one or more data centers. Often, there exists a need to create or expand the computing/storage capacity of these data centers to accommodate usage demands of the service applications and to help ensure that an entire service application does not become unavailable due to a lack of support from the underlying hardware.
Expansion of the data centers may involve various scenarios, such as configuring a new set of hardware or reconfiguring an existing set of hardware to operate in concert with the existing nodes within the data centers. In one example, a new set of racks that each accommodates a plurality of blades may be targeted for being integrated within a fabric that interconnects the data center nodes. This fabric helps ensure that the service-application components distributed across the existing nodes and the newly added hardware such as racks, network devices (L2/3 switches, routers, load balancers), power and serial devices, and blades are able to interact as if each service application was running on its own independent computing device.
When conducting an expansion of a data center, the steps for integrating the new set of hardware into the fabric are presently manually conducted. These manually conducted steps are often time-consuming, ineffective, and inconsistent in result, thus, potentially leading to service interruptions within the fabric. Accordingly, an automated end-to-end process that builds out a set of designated hardware for deployment into a fabric would help achieve an efficient, robust, and scalable framework for expanding the computing/storage capacity of a data center.